Meg Muthupandiyan
The Antlers
The hart’s antlers root upward
out of the darkness—
an architecture
molded in velvet,
poured of bone.
They command my attention
for a season
but are like consciousness itself
soft thoughts ossifying
in complicated schemes,
formed and lost
and formed again,
held and discarded in their time.
Meg Muthupandiyan is a writer, visual artist, and public humanities scholar. The founding director of Poetry in the Parks (poetryintheparks.org), her work celebrates the development of ecological consciousness. Two of her chapbook manuscripts have been semi-finalists for Wolfson Press’s poetry prize and her poems, illustrations, photographs, and nature essays have appeared in over thirty journals and anthologies. Her illuminated poetry volume, Forty Days in the Wilderness, Wandering, was published in 2021. Connect with her and her work at meganmuthupandiyan.com.